


The Fine Art of Hacking the System

by Moorishflower



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Body Horror, Body Modification, Computer Programming, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, More Than It Seems, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-30
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-13 09:32:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux Captor, bored genius IT consultant for Technix Inc., creator of premium programs and computers, desperate for meaning in his life. Roxy Lalonde, blonde bombshell wunderkind, searching for answers to an unknown question.</p><p>Together, they are...hacker2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You are now chatting with a Licensed IT Service Provider (LISP). Let us help you!

tipsyGnostalgic joined the chat!  
hardwareGuru joined the chat!

TG: who the fucks idea was it to plant an ~ATH easster egg in this stupid program???  
TG: omg easter*  
TG: ngl tho it sucks ass too  
HG: Um.

You spot movement out of the corner of your eye, your cubiclemate taking off his headset with the weary, long-suffering slowness of one who has seen too much, and yet continues to see more every day. Greg is an older human, with a potbelly and a grey streak running from right temple to the crown of his head. The asymmetry of it makes you twitch. You keep an Advil bottle full of Klonopin on hand for such occasions; if anyone notices you popping pills every so often, no one dares to comment. You’re the only one here qualified to fly with the rig they have, and besides, the company’s diversity score would suffer if you left. Trolls are already a huge minority; if Technix cans you, where are they going to find another mustardblood with your sweet skills? Not in this shithole of a city, that’s for damn sure.

“Captor, got a present for you.”

You sigh gustily and log yourself out of the grubnet, safe-ejecting and then unplugging the neural jack from your neck. Being 3D always seems so weird after spending a couple hours manipulating code with your brain. You rub your wrists and your jaw, stretching the kinks out as you slide from your rig to your desk chair. The husktop screen boots to life with a flick of your psionics, bland and near-colorless after the intricacies of the grubnet, spiralling lines of datastreams pinwheeling out into the forever-vastness of the multinet, human and troll code mingling and twirling in elegant DNA strands to make up HTML homepages, Trollmegle, Tumblr, millions of people communicating through perfect, non-judgmental ones and zeroes...

“Yoo-hoo, Earth to Captor. Sent the link to your inbox.”

You blink the fog from your ‘pan and shove your glasses up the bridge of your nose. “What is it?” Your voice has gone hoarse from disuse. How long have you been plugged in? What time did you get here this morning? God, you need a coffee. You need a Red Bull. You need _vodka_. Preferably, you need all three, in progressively larger containers.

“Some chick asking about that program you collabed with Jeff on.”

You didn’t ‘collab’ with anyone on anything. Trollian was entirely your idea, your baby, your code right down to the roots of it, every directory and string of data the result of countless nights of little sleep and no thanks. It just so happens that Jeff is your superior, and when Jeff wants to take credit for a choice piece of programming then that’s what Jeff does. You don’t get much of a say in things; even if they don’t dare fire you, they can make your life miserable if you put up too much of a fuss.

You slide the headset over your ears, wincing when the sensitive tips have to pass through cage-like plastic hoops meant for human-shaped bodies, not yours, too tall and too thin and all angles. “What’s her issue?”

“Says the program’s fucked up? I don’t know, she types like she’s got cats glued to her hands.”

“Try to be a little more helpful, I dare you.”

Greg holds up his hands. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, dude. It’s your work.”

You log onto the LISP network as sysadmin (and God, didn’t you give them an earful for _that_ particular acronym) and check your inbox. Sure enough, Greg’s sent you a link to an on-hold service chat, population: 1. You gear yourself up for a rousing rendition of the ‘have you turned it off and then on again’ song and only hesitate for a second before you click the link.

You are now chatting with a Licensed IT Service Provider (LISP). Let us help you!

twinArmaggedons joined the chat!

TG: FINALLY omg please tell me ur gonna be more hepplful than the other guy  
TG: he was all “uh idk i just work here”  
TA: that’d probably be becau2e he work2 here.  
TG: dont u sass me mr tech guy i knoww this ~ATH file wasnt part of the orginal program so fess up  
TA: waiit a 2econd, ~ATH fiile?

You lean back in your chair, at once bewildered and, dare you say it, impressed? They’re definitely talking about _your_ program; Trollian is the only thing you’ve worked on that you decided to kill two birds with one stone and practice your ~ATH skills while getting paid to do so. They aren’t even supposed to be available to a user; they’re tucked deep in the source code, translated and retranslated back and forth between machine code, C++, and Python. The source code that wasn’t distributed with the .exe Trollian beta. You narrow your eyes at the screen, suspicions rising.

TA: whiich program are you u2iing agaiin?  
TG: um trollian the one with the fuckin death egg hidden in the text directory  
TG: and now my comp is suck in this infinite loop of COMPILE DONT COMPILE COMPLE DONT COMPILE  
TA: you know that the 2ource code wa2n’t made avaiilable iin purcha2ed copiies riight?  
TG: what

Oh man, you can picture her--or possibly him, you don’t automatically toss out the possibility that this is a guy, like Greg does--having a quiet panic attack over inadvertently telling the company she’s stolen from that she did, indeed, Robin Hood her way into a viable Trollian.exe file. You’re snickering to yourself as you type, and Greg keeps looking over at you like he’s worried you’ll snap any minute.

TA: don’t worry, ii dont really care  
TG: huh???  
TG: but its like ur companys prorgrasm?  
TG: fuck *program  
TA: 2o?  
TG: does that mean ur gonna help me?  
TA: hate two 2ay iit but there’2 not much two help from where ii’m 2iittiing.  
TA: you need two reboot iin 2afe mode and reiin2tall from a backup.  
TA: you have a backup riight?  
TG: um duh i got like 4 i was just hopin to avoid that particlar misfortune  
TG: ugh thats like 6 hrs of shit gone tho  
TG: FUCK  
TA: ii would 2ugge2t briingiing iit two our maiin offiice 2o ii could have a look at iit  
TA: but the offiice ii2 in CA and ii dont know where you are.  
TG: omg where in cali  
TG: plz be near san jose  
TA: uh.

Holy shit, what are the odds of this person both pirating _your_ software and also living within a fifty mile radius of you? Sollux Captor doesn’t do serendipity, no sir.

You do terrible coincidences, though. Sometimes it seems like your life is just an endless string of those.

TA: 2iiliicon valley, actually.  
TG: 2iiliicon? :P  
TA: do you want my help or not?  
TG: soooorry mr touchey pants!  
TA: iim goiing to a22ume that you arent completely computer iilliiterate  
TG: well GOSH wat made u think that?  
TA: 2o ju2t google the techniix maiin offiice and 2wiing by on liike monday or 2omethiing  
TA: a2k for 2ollux captor and 2ay you have an appoiintment  
TG: 10-4 mr tech guy  
TG: u better be there bcause my computer is beshitted rn  
TA: be2hiitted?  
TG: total beshittery all up in hurr  
TG: ok im gonna shutdown and hope for the best okay?  
TG: tooodles! ;3

tipsyGnostalgic left the chat! We hope we could help!

What the hell just happened? You take your headset off and massage the tips of your ears; Greg pokes his head around his ridiculously large monitor and says, “So?”

“So, what?”

“So...did you fix her problem or what?” He scoots his chair out so that he can lean his elbows on his knees, staring at you. The urge to shove him backwards with your psionics is powerful, but also repressible. You’re usually fairly content with Greg; you’re well-aware that there are countless assholes in this company who would have made your life hell if you’d been saddled with them as cubiclemates, but Greg is pretty chill. He doesn’t mind that you’re like ten sweeps younger than him, and he doesn’t mind that you’re a troll, and he doesn’t mind that you’re a yellowblood. You know some humans get weird about psionics, but Greg accepted it without comment. These days the only time he mentions them is when he asks you to grab him something from your side of the cubicle and neither of you feel like moving.

You reach for the bottle of Klonopin behind your monitor and shake one of the pills into your palm. “That bad, huh?” Greg says. You swallow the pill dry and rest your head against the desk.

“Nah. ~ATH file fucked up their computer. Bringing it in Monday so I can look at it.”

“You specifically? Damn, Sollux, what kind of crazy magic hacker connection did you form with this chick?”

“Might be a guy.”

“With that font color? Please.”

“I know a guy who types in purple.”

“Correction: you know a _troll_ who types in purple. There’s a difference.”

The reminder is an uncomfortable one. No matter how many years your species has been here, the humans will always see you as _other_. Something in-between sentient and non, male and female, mammal or insect. If you could cut down that divide you would, because there are so many similarities between the code you write with your apiculture networks and the code that humans write with their fully-mechanical computer, oh man, the way you could combine them if you weren’t such shit at everything, why the fuck did you tell that girl (and you do think she’s a girl, you do) to bring her computer in when you so obviously--

“Easy, buddy.” Greg’s huge, soft-blunted hand falls on your shoulder. “I’ll tell Jeff you’re tapped out. You’ve been in that thing since eight, no one’s going to blame you for going home an hour early.”

Is it already that late? You haven’t once looked at a clock, not the entire time you’ve been here. When you plug in you lose track of time, of yourself, of everything but the mechanics of the code you’re writing. Next month, they’re scheduled to overhaul your rig so you can use your psionics on the 3D plane. You’ll be able to work with actual, physical machines, rather than being restricted to a glorified read only mode. You can _build_ shit. Christ, you can’t wait.

“Up you get.”

Greg heaves you from your chair, his fingers skittering uncomfortably close to the neural port on your neck. You bat him away with a small burst of red and blue psionics, and he drops you like a hot potato. “Jesus, okay, just trying to help. Go get some sleep, Captor, you look like shit.”

You drift from the cubicle, barely cognizant of the fact that you’re moving; people move out of your way, so it doesn’t really matter, does it? You get your bag from the staff room lockers, your soup canister from the communal fridge. You pass by Jeff’s office on your way out, but Greg is already there, gesturing with wide, sweeping motions. You hear your name mentioned.

You leave. No one stops you.

The sun is just beginning to go down, lighting up the sky with bright ambers and reds. The humans have some stupid rhyme about that, the color of the sky, as if that pertains in any way to a predictable weather pattern, as if humans aren’t just two steps removed from the deeply superstitious apes they were only a few thousand years ago, they think they’re so much better than you, superior species, fuck that, you, you--

Your head hurts. Bicolored sparks arc down your forearms in jagged streaks; it’s either expend the energy or implode entirely, shit, this is why you don’t want so long before taking your meds when you feel a bad spell coming on. You buckle your bag around your chest, just to keep it safe, and concentrate on _home home home_. Your hivestem, with the graffiti on the sides, some wiseass decided it was funny to spraypaint a picture of a rat caught in a huge moustrap with the hivestem’s name on the side, the broken window of the guy next door to you, the weird hip-hop/ska fusion band upstairs that plays at all hours of the day without regard for the fact that some of their neighbors might not be human...

Familiar. Safe. You let your psionics cushion you, taking the strain off your aching joints and your kinked spine, transferring it your brain, where you can handle the pressure. You hear murmured awe below you, can imagine pointed fingers, humans still unused to watching you occasionally take the cheaper--if more energy-taxing--way home. You close your eyes and refuse to open them. The clouds brush against your face, cold and clear, as you let your psionics gently shuttle you towards home.


	2. Driftwood

You are floating in indeterminate space. You can feel emptiness around you, vast and crushing, but if you stretch your arms out you encounter resistance. A shell surrounds you, invisible but tangible, no give when you push against it, no bend, just an ache in your arms and a dull throbbing in your thinkpan, like you’ve overexerted your psionics. The matte blackness slowly resolves itself into tiny pinpricks of light, stars scattered innumerable across the perfect empty void of space. _Ah,_ you think. You are lying in your wigglerhood recuperacoon. _I left the skylight open_. Any minute now, your lusus will bellow down from the roof, demanding honey, and you’ll have to haul your skinny carcass from the sopor to march, cold and uncomfortable, up the stairs, any minute now...

_Are...awake? ...hear me?_

The stars whisper, sibilant cool light sluicing across your closed eyelids, or are they open, you can’t tell-- dreaming, you must be dreaming, that’s the only explanation because you haven’t been four sweeps old for a long time, you haven’t even seen your lusus for a long time, you--

There are so many stars. It would be so nice to just...lie back. And look at them.

_You..._

What did you dream of? You can’t remember. And that voice.

_Sollux?_

You open your eyes.

And you’re nearly blinded. You make a sound like you’re dying and fling a sopor-covered arm over your face; half-in and half-out of your ‘cupe, you drift in oppressive silence for an age. The light dims. You open your eyes.

There is someone in your hive.

Your instinctive response is to lash out, to scream and snarl and frighten them off. Maybe if you make yourself look bigger, maybe if you stand up...fuck, maybe you can just fling them through a window with your brain, did you even consider that option, you dipshit? You reach for your psionics, only to be met with an opaque wall of benzodiazepine. You don’t know how long it’s been since you made it back to your hivestem, but the Klonopin has obviously kicked in while you were asleep.

“ _Finally_. I was beginning to think you were dead.”

The fight drains out of you. “Hey, KK,” you mutter, and haul yourself, bare-assed and slip-sliding in green ooze, over the lip of your ‘cupe. Karkat watches with the intensely annoyed amusement you’ve come to expect from him whenever you talk to him in person.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me, you piece of shit, you’re aware that it takes me an _hour_ to drive here?”

“Who told you to come?” That came out a bit more snappish than you intended. No, wait, you have every right to be pissed. Karkat’s in your hive without permission. You should...you should...

You should go back to sleep before he realizes what a fuck-up you are. Sure, Karkat is a nubby-horned gremlin with a height complex and an unfortunate obsession with romcoms, but he could still do so, so much better than you.

“You’re a pitiable fucking mess, you know that, Captor? Come here.” Hands hook underneath your armpits and lift you the rest of the way out of the ‘cupe. The average troll wouldn’t know it, the way he goes hemononymous all the time, but he’s highblood strong even if he’s built like a burgundy, all short, stocky limbs and barrel-chested. He bodily drags you to your ablution block and shoves you into the trap with a “Shower already, you smell like _bees_.” You don’t know if he meant that you smell like honey or if you actually, somehow, smell like pollinating insects, but either way that tone brooks no argument.

Every movement feels like someone’s strapped sandbags to your limbs, but you mechanically force yourself to turn on the ablution trap, to pick up the shampoo and the soap, to lather and rinse and lather again, until every trace of sopor has been washed down the drain. Carrying with it, presumably, the scent of bees. Karkat is waiting with a towel when you step out. He remembers to turn the trap off even if you don’t, and he wraps you in soft cotton and dries you off, brushes your hair and rubs argan oil onto your horns and your claws, smears lotion onto your grubscars, and then guides you out to your social block. He’s laid out a pair of jeans and your softest, most well-worn t-shirt, the one you wear when the only thing that keeps you from killing yourself is that it would still be too much effort and you just can’t be bothered.

You make a vague sort of attempt to sit on the sofa in just the towel. Karkat slaps the back of your head and hauls you back to your feet, then forces you to put one leg into the jeans, and then the other. “This isn’t schoolfeeding, button your own damn pants.”

You do so. Karkat shoves the shirt over your head. It’s only when you’re fully dressed that he allows you to sit.

“Greg called,” he says.

The traitorous bastard. You’re going to dump powdered cinnamon on all of his lunches from now on.

“Don’t fucking glare, you unrepentant asshole, he was worried. He said you had some sort of ‘pan meltdown or something?”

“Pushed myself too hard,” you mutter.

“Not fucking good enough.”

“What do you want me to tell you, KK? That I spent ten hours plugged into the grubnet because I had nothing better to do? That last week the only time I wasn’t flying was when I was sleeping? That literally the only thing keeping me from culling myself and saving everyone else the trouble is that I literally _don’t care enough_?” Karkat is silent. “Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought.”

“Sollux, a month ago you told me that you could never kill yourself because it would be denying the world of your genius.”

“Well this isn’t a month ago, is it? Smartass.”

“Ugh, you moody, shit-panned son of a...” He trails off into distressed muttering, instead opting to flit around you, tidying your social block. A few stray bees from your apiaries follow him, presumably in the hopes that he’s merely a very large, cleverly disguised butterfly on its way to some pollen-laden flowers. Eventually, cleaning seems to lose its appeal and Karkat gingerly sits beside you, a careful amount of space between your shoulders.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

You tilt your head back into the cushions, closing your eyes. You try to remember your dream. Something about...stars? No, it’s gone again. “Not really.”

“Then what the pustulent blistering _fuck_ do you want me to do?”

You lift a hand and dreamily, blindly sketch a diamond in the air. “Nothing. You shouldn’t have come by at all. I’m no good like this.” You’re no good like anything.

You feel, but do not see, Karkat take your hand. “You squirming sack of offal,” he says. “You pitiable fuckwad. Why do you have to be the world’s most difficult moirail?”

“You’d have no one to get angry at otherwise.”

“Filthy lies. My entire circle of acquaintances gives me near-daily rage aneurysms as it is, I don’t need you being a useless lisping husk on top of everything else.”

“Oh Karkat, woo me, woo me hard.”

“I will woo your goddamn face into the floor if you don’t get your act together.”

“Such sweet nothings you whisper in my ear.”

“Sollux, I will _cut_ you.”

You fumble around until he drops your hand, and then, while he’s distracted, you take the opportunity to tweak his horn. This sends him into a gratifyingly amusing apoplectic rage fit, and ends with the two of you tussling on the sofa, vying for dominance. Karkat wins, predictably, because he’s a compact motherfucker and you’re all skin and bones, no matter how much you ate when you were going through your adult molt. He pins you by your shoulders to the sofa and drapes himself across your chest, and the two of lie there, panting and snickering like idiots. Oh, but what glorious idiocy. You can feel the black mood that’s been enveloping you for the past few weeks just...lift. It’s like taking off a particularly oppressive and shameful hat, feeling the wind through your hair for the first time in forever, realizing that yes, the sunlight is _warm_ as well as painfully bright.

“What would I do without you, Karkat?”

“Shrivel up and die, probably.”

You card your fingers through his hair, soft, your claws curled in towards your palms. He’s so pitiful, you don’t know how no one has snapped him up for their matesprit yet. Hell, when you were younger there were times you wondered if maybe you weren’t a little redder for him than you thought. But then that whole thing with Gamzee happened, and Karkat was just...yeah. He _needs_ someone to look after. All his fruitless rage becomes problematic when left alone, but given someone to take care of, Karkat converts it all into productive energy. He gets shit done. This is in contrast to you, who have never gotten shit done in any sort of meaningful capacity, not in your entire life.

You push away the dark thoughts looming at the edges of your brain, memories, stone wall crumbling and Vriska laughing and--

“I’m hungry,” you say, and Karkat latches onto it like a lifeline.

“I thought you’d never ask. What do you feel like? Take-out? Thai? There’s a Polish deli down the street, I saw it on my way in, or there’s that Alternian bar on Bollinger, but I don’t know if you can handle greasy shit like that, not the way you’ve been eating, or--”

“KK, easy.” You touch your clawtip to his mouth, grinning a little. “I can handle anything. I really am hungry, though.”

And you are. You didn’t realize it 2D, but you can feel the gnawing pit in your stomach now, simple bodily demands banishing all thoughts of lost moirails and strange dreams. “Buy me some shitty barfood,” you say, and Karkat scowls. God, he’s adorable. “And I’ll tell you about my weird day.”

“What time are you in tomorrow?”

You glance at the wall, scanning for your clock, only to remember, when you don’t see it, how you tore it down with your psionics three weeks ago, how you bisected it in a strange mixture of rage and numb despair, furious that it dared to tell you how your life was ticking away, second by awful second...

“Eight.” It sucks, keeping human time. It sucks and not everyone understands. “But if I come in a little late they won’t say anything. Jeff owes me a shitload of overtime, you don’t even know.”

“I owe him my foot up his goddamn wastechute is what I owe him.”

“Ah, but then who’s going to issue my paychecks? You?”

“Good point. Come on, if I have to listen to any more of your gibbering idiocy on an empty stomach I might just puke.”

“But your stomach’s empty.”

“Then it will be nothing but bile and unadulterated disgust at my life choices, now let’s _go_.”

So you do. You put on some shoes and your jacket, because even though Cupertino is warm in the Spring you’re still thin enough that it doesn’t always penetrate, and then you climb into Karkat’s ridiculous human-style VW Beetle automobile and you both go trundling down the street in search of food. The Alternian bar that Karkat mentioned is, indeed, on Bollinger, named (in the common, somewhat unimaginative fashion of most Alternian restaurants) ‘The Feisty Grub.’ The waiter who seats you is a bored-looking teal with almond-shaped eyes and a thick, indeterminate Eastern accent; you wonder what choices she made to land her here, taking orders from trolls like you and Karkat. You wonder if she even cares. It’s really only the _high_ bloods who cling to the notion of a hemocaste these days, isn’t it? Sure, the writings of the Condesce still condemn blood mutants and lowbloods, but who gives a shit about some text that was written like a billion years ago, right?

You order an entire plate of fried grublegs for an appetizer, and then battered sandworm and tuber chips for the main course. Karkat sticks with the more traditional hoofbeast burger, and steals a few of your grublegs when the teal brings them out for you. You let him. What are moirails for?

"So tell me about your no-doubt scintillatingly boring day at the office."

"KK, you write romance novels, I don't think you can make comments on what I do for a living."

"Shut up and tell me what all the fucking fuss is about."

"Which should I do, shut up or...?"

"Oh my _god_ , Captor."

You laugh, the freest sound you've heard come out of your talkflaps for weeks, and give him an abbreviated version of the events at work while you dip grubleg after grubleg into sweet and sour sauce. He has a general idea of what occurred after you took the Klonopin, thanks to Greg, but the entire conversation with the mysterious tipsyGnostalgic has yet to be shared with anyone.

"So, you...wait, let me get this right, you purposefully put a _dangerous fucking line of code_ in the source for one of the most popular up and coming chat clients, and...no one noticed?"

"They're a bunch of humans, dude, they wouldn't know a basic ~ATH loop if it blew their laptop up in their face."

“And yet one of those humans has managed to not only _find_ your supposedly unfindable source code, but has also managed to pick it apart.”

“Don’t remind me.” He kicks you under the table. “Fuck, all right, remind me all you want, I don’t give a shit. She’ll bring it in Monday, I’ll see if I can fix it, end of story.”

“I can count on both hands the number of times you’ve offered to fix someone’s computer.”

You know at least a few of those times were for Karkat. Before he discovered that writing novels was more fulfilling, he was into writing code, an you were never sure if it was an attempt to emulate or spite you, but it didn’t matter either way, because Karkat was shit at it. His ~ATH loops had a tendency to cause meltdowns of the highest degree on any husktop he worked on, and his viruses were legendary, not for their elegance, but for their sheer fucked-up-ness. Most of the time he muddled through fixing things on his own, but sometimes things were bad enough that he brought you whatever remained of his hard drive. You always pulled through for him.

Always.

“She wasn’t worried,” you mumble, and realize the truth of it as soon as you hear it aloud. “She was...I think she thought it was funny? That she’d somehow managed to get in contact with exactly the guy she needed. She probably...I don’t think she _knows_ I made the program, but I think she suspects it.”

“You got all this from a fifteen-minute chatroom conversation?”

“Well, it was a very revealing font color.”

Karkat kicks you under the table, and you spill sweet and sour sauce over your arm. He snickers while you at first try to mop it up, and then resort to licking the stickiness from your skin, doubly hilarious because when it comes to doing what it’s actually supposed to do, your tongue kind of sucks. The mutant thing, you guess, split _everything_ , tongue and bulge and horns and...and moods, too. And Karkat laughs because he knows. He’s always known.

Probably it’s why you pity him so much.

You finish your grublegs and your sandworm, and when Karkat doesn’t finish his frenchfries you stare pointedly at him until he groans in disgust and shoves the plate across to you. You feel better. You feel _so_ much better. You’re pretty sure that you can take this tipsyGnostalgic person, no matter what they (she) brings you. You’re back on your game, you’re invincible, you’re _amazing_. Karkat watches you, watches the transformation, your spine straightening a little, your movements more animated, your gaze direct when you talk.

Tomorrow, you are going to get up bright and early, and you are going to kick that ~ATH loop’s ass.


End file.
